There's a really cool concept to this, but it's honestly about the hardest game I've ever played. I say this as a person who types 125 WPM and has never broken a sweat playing a typing game before.

Imagine playing bullet hell with your left hand and a typing game with your right, at the same time. It breaks my brain and it's the first time in a really long time that I've hit a difficulty wall that I just can't get past.

I'm leaving this as a positive review because there's something really cool here for the people who can stomach it, but I had to write this to warn anyone considering it that it's not for the faint of heart.

It's terrific. It's hard as heck. It's a boss-heavy (think Cuphead?) shoot'em'up (insert SHMUP here) where you use typing as your method of attack. I squealed, "this.... is.... awesome!!!!" while playing it. Multiple times. It's also super hard. Even if you're a good typist. That might even make it harder, because you *need* to get used to moving with one hand and typing with the other.

A gem.


~ EDIT @ 5 hour mark:
This game is brutally hard and I am having trouble continuing, even though I want to. I touch-type fairly well (over 100WPM generally, peaking around 120) and I have spent the last two hours agonizing over a boss fight. Perhaps there is a technique that I am missing — I've come within mere letters of defeating it — but it is *excruciating*. I think the main issue is upon getting hit, the book can fly darn well wherever it pleases, which is sometimes fair, and sometimes totally unfair and just in a mess of bullets. Whether or not you'll need to re-type a massively lengthy thing can feel really arbitrary. And the timer on the book is just - so - short.

I really feel it would be in the developer's favor to make some assorted difficulty or assistance sliders. I get that you want the game to be tough, but .... recently, games like Celeste, which can be really tough, have a few options to adjust for certain attributes of the game; CrossCode is another cool example. Would it really be that hard to, at a minimum, have various difficulty levels where the timer of the book could be adjusted?

At this point, I am really conflicted about recommending it to folks - if I can't finish it, I really don't think many of my friends could.

This game is great! Art/music is solid, story is entertaining. Difficulty is high, gameplay is fun, all things I appreciate greatly.

I can't recommend it.

Why? The controls. You hold the shift key in order to move, release it to type. The problem with this is after about 10 minutes of gameplay I've smashed my poor pinky against shift so much that it's sore for an hour. It might help if I was better at typing, but whatever.

There's been 2 solutions proposed on the discussion boards. Mine was using caps lock to toggle shift movement (i.e. caps lock off = shift to move; caps lock on = shift to type) so I can swap between toggling and holding movement on the fly. The better solution was the ability to remap the shift key to spacebar, since it's A MUCH BETTER key to use, especially considering spacebar isn't used in battles. With spacebar as the movement key you wouldn't have to take your hands off the homerow or stretch a digit to keep up with what you're doing. It basically just adds a layer of artificial difficulty by NOT allowing you to use spacebar.

I was amazed this wasn't in the game by the time I found it (they already did an update allowing you to remap wasd, figured this would have come up by now), was surprised when my multiple posts and emails were absolutely fruitless in getting any sort of response, and kind of just shocked they've released a DLC (meaning they're still working on it) and this fix hasn't been addressed in any way. I've given up on being able to play this game comfortably, and it sucks because I was really into it.

EDIT: Since this review took off a bit, I do want to say it's still worth checking out. It's absolutely worth purchasing at it's sale price, and if they ever address this simple issue, I'd say it's worth full price. Despite the painful control scheme, it was fun enough for me to put 7 hours in, and the only reason I stopped was to attempt to contact the devs to implement this more comfortable control scheme. Hopefully this will help get the devs to notice the biggest thing holding this game back... I want to finish it someday.

The core gameplay here is excellent and unique. I recommend it.
The combination bullet hell and typing test is clever and well executed. It forces you to learn a novel skill and think differently. At first your brain will not want to do this, so you'll try some Bad Ideas.
First you will try typing one handed while doing movement with your other hand on the arrow keys.
Then you'll go two-handed typing, but move your right hand back and forth to do movement.
Then you'll switch to shift-WASD to move, so your hands are always on the home row, but you'll still stop typing to move. Patiently finding safe spots to type a word or two. Then dodging again.
Finally, you'll realize that you can type all the letters except WASD while moving, and you'll only stop for those four. Even better, you'll start using other fingers for the WASD fingers.

Getting to that last style will make the normal game pretty trivial, but it's still very satisfying.
Hardcore is mostly doable. I think the last couple bosses are BS.

The game is wrapped in a fun style. However, everything that isn't the actual gameplay, the actual fights, is just bad. The story is dumb and navigating it is tedious. The conversations are idiotic and slow. The itemization is a waste of time, and will only teach you bad habits for when hardcore comes and you can't use items. I wish there was a way to skip all the filler and just do the fights. Still, it's worth it.

I ran into a couple of bugs, but nothing that made me upset. I highly recommend the game.

My fingers hurt but now I know how to speak Latin

High strangeness with panache!

Banish demons by actually typing holy words of exorcism while you twinkle-toe around storms of Satanic bullets in this gonzo indie masterpiece! The Textorcist is truly an impressive bit of gaming, and that's not hyperbole -- it takes an outrageous concept and executes it in such a fun, fairly challenging, and weird way that you'll be shocked it hasn't been done so well before . . . or at all, really.

If you're a fair typist, you've got a taste for the outre, and you're just a teensy bit hardcore, buy this now! And as an added perk, typing those long Latin phrases while threading mazes of glowing deathballs will almost certainly improve your RL keyboard skills.

(I'd like to add that my typing -- accuracy, speed, etc. -- has suffered tremendously as of late, and for some reason I cannot define, affecting both my work and recreational writing. But upon playing this game, I actually began to see an immediate improvement, and now I'm getting back to where I was before! I'll never look askance at a typing game again, even when it's not this cool.)

Is this the dark souls of typing games?
yes

The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibbia is a fun game mixed with bullet hell and typing.

Pros
-Good art.
-Good music.
-Actual texts of exorcism.
-Fast level replay design.

Cons
-Steam screenshot key not working at all.
-Some texts are confusing e.g. 'Appia' street where 'a' looks like 'd' with the game's font.

I figured it out!
It's a local co-op game where one person types, and the other one dodges.

One keyboard, two keyboards, or slow-clicking on docked on-screen keyboard.
The last one feels more like a cheat...

Nice to play with your kid.

Instead of using SHIFT + WASD to move, you can rebind the movement keys in the settings to SHIFT + ESDF so you can type normally much faster.